


The Motion of Bodies in Public Spaces

by Petronia



Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Christmas, Original Character(s), Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-13
Updated: 2012-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 11:25:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronia/pseuds/Petronia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers, modern mores, and late 20th to early 21st century art.</p><p>Rating, relationships, and characters subject to change as fic progresses, but likely to draw on some of the more recent Brubaker Captain America and Winter Soldier comics (the canon has to come from somewhere).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Shining Star Upon The Highest Bough

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arboretum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arboretum/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve hears “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” while getting takeaway from one of the glass-fronted coffee shops (not diners; not delis; not bars) dotted all over Midtown. It’s not the version he remembers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is really just the beginning of a longer story about Steve Rogers adapting to the modern world, but I'm posting it chapter-wise because I wrote it for a seasonal exchange (the recipient just got it), and it would be odd to post a story in March that starts off with Christmas. ^^;

Steve hears “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” while getting takeaway from one of the glass-fronted coffee shops (not diners; not delis; not bars) dotted all over Midtown. It’s not the version he remembers. The voice belongs to a woman, carried on a swell of strings and chimes, and it takes a few moments for him to recognize the song, because there’s an additional verse tacked onto the beginning:

_I’m dreaming tonight of a place I love  
Even more than I usually do  
And although I know it’s a long road back  
I promise you..._

Her voice is clear and low, sweet to the point of pain, and when Steve finally registers the tune the air disappears from his lungs as if a vacuum has opened in his chest. Everything comes through muted: the chattering students and tourists, the whirr of the newfangled coffee machine. For a second it's just him, and the unseen radio.

 _You should have kept track of the date,_ he thinks. Last Christmas was hard, abroad and far from home; perhaps it will always be hard, now.

 

* * *

 

He still looks around for the radio, out of habit; in most cases he doesn't find it. (The context for all of his habits is gone.) The 21st century likes to hide the truth of objects behind machined panels, smooth curves, translucent plastic; surfaces that reflect distorted images of Steve back to himself. Manhattan is a canyon of steel-boned blue crystal, and at SHIELD Headquarters unseen light sources brighten and dim as Steve passes down corridors by himself, the electric computers controlling them murmuring to themselves in the ceilings and floors.

There is music and talk everywhere, filling the air. To Steve it mostly sounds like machine static. Coloured screens and moving billboards and _holograms._ But over the course of December, he's arrested more and more frequently by snippets of old carols, and then – astonishingly – the novelty popular recordings from his own last Christmas. Or Christmas two years ago, when he heard plenty of them performed live, on tour; or three, the month America joined the War. But changed, as often as not, disarranged and overwritten and resung, as if he's slipped sidewise from the world he knew into a realm where everything is both familiar and strange. Judy Garland's tremolo, calling up the tinny scratch of the barracks player, and yellow lamp glow on Bucky's face: _Here we are as in olden days / happy golden days of yore..._ But the voice is now Frank Sinatra's, and as smooth and free of artifact as Fairyland could demand.

They still put up a Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, the tallest he's ever seen. When Steve asks he's told they never stopped. That doesn't surprise him: looking at the tree, now, doesn't inspire the full-body nostalgia of the songs, so much as it varnishes his memories with belated understanding. At the time he felt a strange, displaced excitement, standing here with his mother on the cusp of boyhood, or – years later – alone, or by Bucky's side. Now he knows that they were glimpses of a different, future time: that eventually the world itself would brim with lights. Travellers brushing shoulders, hurtling in divergent directions along an untrodden path – the tree and he.

The lights themselves, of course, have a different quality from what he recollects; one that's become rapidly familiar. The new world is full of these casual, unwavering bright pinpricks, cool to the touch, like fragments of fallen stars.

 

* * *

 

"Bing Crosby," Tony says. "No, wait. Did I get that? I think I'm thinking of the Elvis version. There was an Elvis version, right?"

" _Elvis' Christmas Album,_ 1957," says JARVIS agreeably, "contemporaneous to Frank Sinatra's cover. Other artists who have covered 'I'll Be Home For Christmas' include Perry Como, Dwight Yoakam, Gloria Estefan, and Bob Dylan - on his 2009 album, _Christmas in the Heart._ The song touched the hearts of both soldiers and civilians in the midst of World War II, and earned Crosby his fifth gold record. 'I'll Be Home For Christmas' became the most requested song at Christmas U.S.O. shows. _Yank,_ the GI magazine, said Crosby 'accomplished more for military morale than anyone else of that era'. End quote.”

“...Are you reading off _the Wikipedia entry?_ Don't make me come over there.”

“The most probable match for the description provided by Captain Rogers is a version sung by Karen Carpenter, recorded in 1978 for the album _Christmas Portrait._ Other possibilities—"

"It's all right," Steve says, "you don't have to." Tony waves a hand as if physically brushing away his words.

"Play it. The first one."

A beam of light – _hologram!_ – forms in the center of the workshop, motes coalescing into the shape of a young woman. She wears her hair in a billowing cloud, and a velvet cloak around her hunched shoulders. Her surroundings are blurred, but there are snowflakes falling, Steve sees, caught in her chestnut curls.

"Christmas specials of my shitty seventies childhood," Tony says, not sounding displeased. "Welcome to the hegemonic era of network television."

Karen Carpenter lifts her head, strings rise and fall, and she begins to sing.

_Christmas Eve will find me  
 Where the lovelight gleams  
 I’ll be home for Christmas  
 If only in my dreams_


	2. The Motion of Bodies In Public Spaces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s regulation, soldier,” says Fury. “More to the point, it’s in your best interest. I’m not saying you’re a liability, but no matter what you think now, it’s going to take you more than the couple of months you’ve had to adjust. Even if you have the big picture down, the details’ll trip you up. Think of it as a medical followup.”
> 
> He doesn’t, however, sound unsympathetic. It occurs to Steve that, were their positions to be reversed, he would be more likely to see Fury chew gravel than acquiesce in good grace to a head-shrinking.
> 
> So he says, “If you want me to adjust, give me more training. Not just what to say or what to do; I want to know what things mean. I don’t want to talk about what it feels like to have missed all that time, and I don’t want to read about it in a book. I want to know what it would have felt like to live it.”

_Eight months earlier_

 

 

SHIELD finds Steve an apartment in Brooklyn. Not in Midwood or Bed-Stuy -- as bewilderingly unrecognizable now as the _Wonder Stories_ fantasy that is Times Square -- but the top floor of a renovated red-brick rowhouse in Brooklyn Heights, with a view of the Bridge through broad paned windows. The neighbourhood remains well off, it seems, and thus better preserved; though, by the same token, Steve was never familiar with it. It’s a combination he can just about stand.

Most mornings he’s out of bed before dawn, eats and showers and watches the sunrise. The sky would lighten gradually, silhouetting the Manhattan skyline, then break over the skyscrapers in a transmuting flood of rose-gold light. Further into the bay, Lady Liberty stands immutable, her raised arm blurred softly blue by distance. _All right,_ he thinks, like he does the first time they clear him to wander the future of his own city unsupervised, and he ends up in the land’s end of Battery Park, gazing out seaward: _all right, there’s one thing, at least._ Then he goes running.

For the first few weeks he does nothing but run. He doesn’t want to sleep, doesn’t want to sit still, and this makes it easier: narrows requirements down to _dodging traffic_ and _relearning the grid_. It’s a popular hobby now, they tell him, and he finds the marked paths -- starts on the Promenade, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan Island, then heads down to Battery Park and up the Esplanade. Then back. He gets the round trip done before morning traffic and barely breaks a sweat, so eventually he just keeps going. The upper bound becomes 14th Street, then 34th Street, then 42nd Street. He notes an ugly glass behemoth being built -- or possibly rebuilt -- on Park Avenue, standing isolated from its peers behind Grand Central Station; every few runs it seems to add another floor. On other occasions he heads the other way, across the old Navy Yards into Williamsburg, or circling south around Prospect Park.

SHIELD tells him they’ve found Peggy, eventually. That she’s still alive, still alert, though very fragile; that he can choose to contact her, if he wants. He thinks they might have known from the first, but have been waiting for him to achieve some external semblance of equilibrium. Did they assume it would hurt him, he wonders. As if some stubborn part of him might believe, but for the signs of age on her living face, that everything he’s experienced since waking has been a lie; that the Peggy Carter he remembers is out there somewhere, young and strong and beautiful and free?

They would have been right.

He goes to see her. He wanted -- he wants that very much.

Afterward, he hits the gym.

SHIELD assigns him a psychologist. To be precise, at first they send one to speak to him, without telling him what it’s about. Dr. Karnathy is an older gentleman, with spectacles and a quiet, attentive manner; he reminds Steve immediately of Dr. Erskine. A kind man, a good listener, even a father figure -- someone with whom it’s not a hardship to sit and chat for an hour or two a week. SHIELD’s studied his file. But Steve recognizes the interviews for what they are, and he doesn’t want to talk.

SHIELD comes clean, and asks -- orders -- him to try. But Steve has a sense of what the sessions are meant to accomplish, and he doesn’t think they’ll do that. He also -- though he mentions nothing about it to anyone -- very much doubts SHIELD’s assurances of confidentiality.

“It’s regulation, soldier,” says Fury. “More to the point, it’s in your best interest. I’m not saying you’re a liability, but no matter what you think now, it’s going to take you more than the couple of months you’ve had to adjust. Even if you have the big picture down, the details’ll trip you up. Think of it as a medical followup.”

He doesn’t, however, sound unsympathetic. It occurs to Steve that, were their positions to be reversed, he would be more likely to see Fury chew gravel than acquiesce in good grace to a head-shrinking.

So he says, “If you want me to adjust, give me more training. Not just what to say or what to do; I want to know what things _mean._ I don’t want to talk about what it feels like to have missed all that time, and I don’t want to read about it in a book. I want to know what it would have felt like to _live_ it.”

It’s more than he meant to let out when he opened his mouth. Fury leans back in his chair, eyebrows knotting; but in thought, not irritation. There is silence, and Steve senses enough to let it stand.

“Tall order, Rogers,” Fury says, finally. “I’ll see what we can do. But if we find you a therapist according to your specifications, you go. Understood?”

 

***

 

Two weeks later a SHIELD agent he’s seen once or twice tracks Steve down in the gym, and ushers in - with no particular ceremony - a tall, very thin woman in her fifties. He grabs a towel and wipes his face and hands off hurriedly.

“This is Ms. Nannerl Goldstein,” says the agent. What was his name -- Sitwell? “Ms. Goldstein, Captain Steve Rogers.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Steve says. He’s conscious of the sweat plastering his t-shirt to his back, of being severely underdressed for female company. He can’t get fully used to the casualness, the _nakedness,_ but no one else seems to care. The woman just smiles and extends her hand.

“Likewise, Captain,” she says. “And please, call me Nan. Unless that makes you uncomfortable, in which case call me whatever you like.”

“Thank you,” Steve says, a little startled, and shakes her hand. Her fingers feel bony and slight, within his, but her grip is steady. She has a pleasantly lined face - someone who both smokes and laughs a great deal, he thinks - and long brown hair pulled back and plaited. Her eyes are blue. The name - German? Perhaps Jewish. But she sounds American, with a touch of what might be Boston. And Germany, he reminds himself, is no longer an enemy.

"Ms. Goldstein," says possibly-Sitwell, "has been with us on a part-time consultant basis for nearly eight years now. She works primarily with new recruits, but at times we've also called her in on mandates where she had to advise SHIELD operatives on more specific missions, so you can assume she has clearance up to level five." He looked at the woman, then back at Steve. "We have her pegged as a subject matter expert on non-verbal communication. Fury thought she might help you conduct your deep dive into the last sixty-odd years of data, as it were."

"Ma'am," Steve says as a placeholder, attempting to parse this flood of organization-speak. The woman smiles.

"If you're wondering about my day job, Captain," she says, "I'm a modern dance choreographer."

The SHIELD man shrugs, slightly. Steve has noticed that they tend to be men and women of vastly elastic composure.

 

***

 

"I fell into it," she tells him afterward, over cups of coffee at one of the ubiquitous green-signed Starbucks shops. His is plain black with cream, hers a much smaller cup flecked with milk foam. "I teach dancers, and create dances, new ones, for a living. They're often commissioned by an art centre, or foundation, from some government grant or other -- well, one time the funding came from SHIELD. I think they needed it for a cover story. Nick Fury came to see the performance in New York; that's what they told me afterward. That led to a talk at a conference, which led to a tutorial – that was an interesting experience – and on from there."

Steve composes, with difficulty, a mental picture of Director Fury attending the ballet. "You teach SHIELD agents to... dance?" He can see that, at a long stretch – an unusual physical training, an expertise to back a covert identity. A skill that Steve himself still lacks, for that matter. He supposes he’s capable of picking it up easily, now; but he’s lost the desire to try.

If that much were in his SHIELD file... but it hardly seems the sort of weak point Fury would consider himself duty-bound to correct.

"Mmm, not exactly. I teach them observation, for the most part. Observation, interpretation, feedback, and mimicry, that's the important stuff in a nutshell. Though they call me in for movement coaching as well." She tilts her chin toward the shopfront window, seeing him frown. "Do you see those people standing on the next corner, there?"

Steve nods.

"What do you think they're doing?"

Chatting – no. They aren’t paying attention to each other. Steve narrows his eyes, considering. Then one of them turns his head, and he sees the dark earpiece, and the jut of the now-recognizable microphone.

"They're talking," he says slowly, "on the—" it would not be military use, out on the street. "On the telephone. Separately."

Nan makes an affirmative sign. "I was watching you," she says. "You see very well, don't you? You can tell every detail at that distance. To me they’re blurs."

“Yes, ma’am,” says Steve, who in fact has always been able to see nearly that far; vision was never the problem.

“Ten years ago,” says Nan, “you would never have seen people doing that. Very recent, those headsets. Some people think they’re awful. I don’t mind them, but I’m one of the last people you’ll meet who doesn’t carry a cell phone at all.” She shrugs, smiles. “I’ll have to get one soon. We’re just on the cusp of a change, there – soon it will be impolite not to be reachable, if you live in the city. You’ll see it happen in the next year or two, if you pay attention.”

Steve thinks of his own, SHIELD-issue portable telephone. Ease and speed of communication are crucial to any operation, he knows, but it’s not wartime anymore.

“Everyone can call anyone else at just about any time,” he says, “but people hardly look each other in the eye when they’re together. Most of the time they don’t even _talk,_ they just send teletype. And—” he stops.

“...And everyone tries to tell you how wonderful these contraptions are, even though they’re just glorified walkie-talkies?”

Steve doesn't say anything. It occurs to him that it might be nice if someone's said that to him, because it would mean striking up a conversation. He pictures the commuters he sees on the A train: wires trailing from their ears, gazes glued to their screens.

“People used to smoke,” Nan says. “You remember that. When you saw young men loafing on the sidewalk, doing something with their hands up against their face, you would assume they were smoking.”

“And they don’t, anymore?” Cigarette smoke always set off Steve’s asthma as a child. It was a weakness; one of many it was assumed he would age out of, or else not age at all. By the time he enlisted it was no longer a problem, but he’s never enjoyed the smell. He’s gradually come to realize that it’s no longer allowed indoors, at least in restaurants and office buildings, but that only seems to drive the smokers outside.

“It’s a process. But people are smoking less and less, yes. And they’re buying more and more mobile phones. So there’s a whole language that shifts—”

She lifts her long-fingered hands, and Steve sees it: taking a pack of cigarettes out of a breast pocket, shaking it, putting a cigarette to one’s lips. Cupping the lighter against the wind, shoulders hunched. One flick, two flicks.

The motion jars an image loose in his mind, or rather stored sensation – biting cold, the sharp clarity that comes with snow and night and the stillness of vast distances. Hands cupped over hands, not to guard against wind, but to hide the tell-tale red flare of man-made light.

Warmth, though; just for an instant, dissipating with the smell of naphtha and burnt tar.

Nan Goldstein was speaking again.

“The way people move in public spaces, the way they stand and sit and turn, the motion of bodies... that’s part of what I’m concerned with, in my art, because dance is built from gestures. But the audience has to understand, you see: to remember with their heart, or even better, their gut. They shouldn’t have to intellectualize. So the onus is on me to learn their language. I understand _how_ to learn, I think, if nothing else.

“You remembered something just now. What was it?"

He swallows, looks away. Back to what SHIELD wanted. It's all part of the public record, and far from an enemy interrogation. So why is he reluctant to give up names?

"A mission during the War," he says. "One of the last ones."

 

***

 

Nan gives him her business card, when they leave the coffee shop. "If and when you're ready, Captain," she says.

He considers it. But a week later Fury tracks him down with a cardboard folder in hand, and everything changes.


End file.
